What I did was write the first kanji with Ben Bullock's SLJFAQ drawing pad, then searched for that on WWWJDIC constraining it to only compounds with that kanji as the first kanji. Just my luck it was the LAST ONE after several pages, but I found it.

There must be a better way? I couldn't for the life of me figure out which radicals were used on the second kanji, so I had to do it the hard way.

(I suppose for future reference 箋 on Wiktionary shows me what the stroke counts and individual radicals are... the top part was bamboo. 竹 with 2 戈戈 stacked on top of each other below it.)

I can't really think of any way that doesn't need you to be able to recognize the 竹 radical, or at least recognize there are exactly 6 strokes there at the top. The only thing I can say in that case is "learn more kanji" sadly :/ Have to get used to recognizing kanji shapes...The 竹 radical is in nice words like: 笑う（わらう）"laugh"; 第一（だいいち） "1st"; 箱（はこ）"box"; 等（など）"etc."...竹 itself is apparently kyouiku grade 1 >_>;

That's exactly the reason why children don't like Chinese Hanzi (including me when I was younger). It can be a pain to look up words.

In the beginning, you just need to guess the radical, if you're lucky, you hit the right word and from there you can easily find associated compound words like what Justin is describing.

Online dictionaries can be a hassle because you have extra steps to learn, I think. It's quite different from looking up directly from your paper dictionary or electronic dictionary. I agree with Hyperworm, it just takes time to recognize a word. Also, once you know this word has blah blah radical, it's fixed, all you need to do is memorize the radical for this word, every procedure to look up "unfamiliar" word is the same.

If you want to find out the radical reading, you might want to try this online website, it tells you the word 付 is にんべん ( イ). One thing , it doesn't contain many compound words. Alternatively, you might want to try Tangorin of which Hyperworm links there.

Hyperworm wrote:I can't really think of any way that doesn't need you to be able to recognize the 竹 radical, or at least recognize there are exactly 6 strokes there at the top. The only thing I can say in that case is "learn more kanji" sadly :/ Have to get used to recognizing kanji shapes...The 竹 radical is in nice words like: 笑う（わらう）"laugh"; 第一（だいいち） "1st"; 箱（はこ）"box"; 等（など）"etc."...竹 itself is apparently kyouiku grade 1 >_>;

I actually know that kanji full-size, I just didn't realize that's what the little top part of the other kanji was. Now I know!

The second kanji is a real mess in low resolution, not really amenable to handwriting copying, which would be my default approach :/

Thanks, I'll have to check all that out as well.

Hyperworm wrote:(TJP is really crawling for me at the minute... ._.)

I THINK I have this fixed finally! The problem is the stupid "TJP Friends" box on the left... so I set the javascript to deferred load, so that everything else will load before it bothers with that, so everything should load right away again. Let me know if you have any more problems with it! Sorry for the headache! I have an ad blocker installed, so it was skipping that thinking it was an ad and so I wasn't even seeing the problem at all. When Dustin asked what "cache.worldfriends.tv" was, I instantly knew and got the problem fixed. Thanks Dustin!

SS wrote:If you want to find out the radical reading, you might want to try this online website, it tells you the word 付 is にんべん ( イ). One thing , it doesn't contain many compound words. Alternatively, you might want to try Tangorin of which Hyperworm links there.